They made us so proud. But I'm afraid the Olympic legacy is bitter disappointment

Few of us will have any trouble remembering what we were doing exactly a year ago tonight. Along with most of the human race, we were watching one of the great spectacles of modern time.

The Queen’s debut as a Bond girl? Danny Boyle’s industrial revolution? Mr Bean? We all have a favourite moment from the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.

And even those who never got a ticket will remember the national transformation that followed. Britain suddenly felt a great deal better about itself. Until then, we hadn’t challenged the myth of our post-war, post-imperial decline.

London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony was ended with spectacular fireworks

There will be more of the same magic over this weekend as Jessica Ennis and the gang return to a sold-out Olympic Stadium for the Anniversary Games

Now, we were pleasantly reminded that, in fact, we were actually really rather good at colossal events; at building things and running trains on time. As it turned out, we’d also learned to win once again. With the glorious Diamond Jubilee on top, that whole summer now seems swathed in red, white and blue.

One year on, and the 2012 magic is still working. Andy Murray, the British Lions, the Ashes, the Tour de France — not to mention Prince George.

The scenes outside Buckingham Palace on Monday night were pure 2012. The crowds were cheering in every language on Earth, and even the drunks were pleasant.

One year on, and the 2012 magic is still working with athletes like Andy Murray continuing to fly the flag for Britain

And there will be more of the same over this weekend as Jessica Ennis and the gang return to a sold-out Olympic Stadium for the Anniversary Games.

To cap it all, the Government has published a shiny report claiming the Games have not only generated £9.9 billion, but that legions of idlers have been inspired to crawl off the sofa and shape up. A new slimmer, richer Britain is here. Is there no end to the miraculous powers of the rings? Or is this a moment to pause, sober up and return to reality for a moment?

For let’s recall that we were told some whopping great fibs in the run-up to the Games. Boris Johnson has repeated his ‘on time and on budget’ mantra so often, it seems to have ossified in the public mindset.

The Games were on time, of course. But on budget? The budget, when we won the bid in 2005, was £2.4 billion. Over the next seven years, it almost quadrupled to £9.3 billion. If you hired a builder for an agreed sum, and his bill went up four-fold, I don’t think you’d let him proclaim he’d been ‘on time and on budget’. You’d take him to court.

The scenes outside Buckingham Palace on Monday night were pure 2012. The crowds were cheering in every language on Earth, and even the drunks were pleasant

But then, as the Olympics would show time and again, where public money is involved, different rules apply. Hence the £2.8 million redundancy bonuses and pay-offs for various Olympic high-ups announced this week. We all knew that ‘London 2012’ was going to end in 2012. So why were these people not employed on fixed contracts?

But while there’s been no shortage of public cash to throw at grand buildings and Olympic executives, some of our sporting stars have fared less well. Despite winning the first British gold of the Games (along with fellow rower Heather Stanning), Helen Glover still has no main sponsor and can barely afford to repair her car.

Likewise, with no main sponsor, the men’s rowing team (some of whom are 6ft 8in) will have to squash into the cheapest seats at the back of the plane for next month’s world championships in Korea. Even long-jumper Greg Rutherford, one of the gold-medal heroes of ‘Super Saturday’, was dumped by Nike soon afterwards — and now lacks a sponsor.

The budget, when we won the bid in 2005, was £2.4¿billion. Over the next seven years, it almost quadrupled to £9.3¿billion

None of them ever went in to this for the money. But it’s hardly a great come-on for young athletes to know that Olympic glory is substantially less rewarding than being a lower-league footballer.

So, what of those future athletes? According to the new ‘Inspired by 2012’ legacy document, 1.4 million more people are now playing sport. But take a closer look: this figure straddles a seven-year period. The actual number of extra people playing sport in England since the 2012 Olympics is, well, none. Because the numbers have dropped by 100,000.

Look at the Sport England data on, say, the number of people who are members of sports clubs. There has been a drop of more than 200,000 since last year. Over a five-year span, there’s been a drop of 670,000.

Sport England insists that more people are playing ‘informal’ sport. ‘A lot of people now prefer to have a game of five-a-side football than join a club,’ says a spokesman. As for the decline in post-Games activity, Sport England puts that down to bad weather in March. It hardly stacks up to a sporting revolution.

Boris Johnson has repeated his 'on time and on budget' mantra so often, it seems to have ossified in the public mindset

Just this week, Sir Keith Mills, former deputy chairman of 2012, complained that a ‘barmy’ lack of co-ordination between Government departments was squandering any legacy at local level.

The greatest fib, though, was not a sporting one at all. It was Danny Boyle’s brilliantly choreographed opening-ceremony tribute to the National Health Service, ‘the envy of the world’ and all that — complete with Florence Nightingale-style nurses in starched uniforms. Had we known then what we know now — about the thousands of unnecessary deaths in recent years; the institutional, serial maltreatment of the helpless; the cover-ups and gagging orders — then there would have been more hollow laughter than applause.

Looking back, Boyle might wish he’d lionised one or two other British inventions instead. It’s not as if he was short of material: the jet engine, the railway, television — even football . . .

Just this week, Sir Keith Mills, former deputy chairman of 2012, complained that a 'barmy' lack of co-ordination between Government departments was squandering any legacy at local level

Now, I freely admit that I was what Boris Johnson called an Olympic ‘doom-monger’. I genuinely feared we were going to end up with a similar multi-billion-pound shambles to the one you still find in Athens, host of the 2004 Games. A year afterwards, I was apprehended there by the police for watching a property developer bulldozing a supposed ‘legacy’ venue. On my last trip, I found that the grass in the Olympic softball stadium came up to my shoulders. You could keep a tiger in there, and no one would know.

There were never any doubts that our Olympic fortnight would go according to plan. But at what cost? And what would be the true legacy?

The 1976 Montreal Games almost bankrupted that city, and today its Olympic stadium has no main tenant. Likewise the Olympic stadium in Barcelona. Even Sydney, host of the great Olympiad of 2000, was left with a vast complex of redundant venues that took years and billions of dollars to sort out.

And, like many, I also resented the way that the whole of Britain had to subjugate itself to the puffed-up International Olympic Committee. When shops were threatened with prosecution for putting Olympic displays in the window, our Government should have told the IOC where they could stick their precious rings. But come that momentous evening, exactly one year ago, all those concerns simply faded away. Lord Coe and his magnificent team had taken a huge gamble, had endured seven years of carping from us doom-mongers, and delivered a triumph. As the Queen appeared to float in from on high, the brilliant originality and titanic scale of London 2012 was already sinking in.

Now that a year has passed, however, we should regain a sense of perspective. Parts of the new official report are simply Toytown accounting.

It claims, for example, that the planned redevelopment of London’s Battersea Power Station by a Malaysian consortium is a direct result of the Olympics. In fact, this grey elephant has been changing hands for the past 30 years, and a deal was in place long before the first backside sat on the first Olympic seat.

My favourite section states: ‘Bespoke economic modelling utilising an input-output framework suggests that the impacts that can already be clearly identified at this early stage will in total generate some £28 billion to £41 billion in GVA [Gross Value Added].’ Oh dear. The fibbing really has got out of hand. At least the Business Secretary, Vince Cable, had the decency to admit: ‘Would this have happened anyway? Some of these activities clearly would, but the Olympics were a key catalyst.’

Lord Harris of Haringey, the Labour chairman of the Lords’ Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee, is more succinct: ‘I’m afraid you have to take all of these figures with a large pinch of salt.’

It’s a pity the Olympic organisers still feel obliged to bombard us with fairy tales, because there is plenty of tangible economic benefit to applaud. The Games gave a huge boost to Britain’s international standing. Take the rankings of the International Congress and Convention Association. Thanks to the Games, London is up from 19th to sixth place. That unquestionably translates into serious business spending flowing into Britain from overseas.

And I have no doubt that the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park will become a major tourist attraction in due course. Just not yet.

Right now, it’s a bombsite, as the temporary venues — such as the 12,000-seat basketball arena — are removed, and the others — such as the aquatics centre and velodrome — are converted for civilian use.

‘Everything is exactly on schedule,’ says my guide, Dennis Hone, chief executive of the London Legacy Development Corporation, which is rebuilding the park. ‘There’s been a complete change in the way people think of this part of London. And that’s what the Olympics have done.’

Certainly, the locals can look forward to an enormous new public space and what will surely be the smartest municipal baths in history. Thanks to the fancy-pants roof, that aquatics centre alone will have cost £270 million.

It is a reminder of the way in which the great London Olympic adventure got out of hand.

Yes, the people of Newham now have a lovely place to swim — but at the expense of other people all over the country who still have nowhere to swim because the Olympics soaked up the cash. Up in Sheffield, the Don Valley Stadium, which produced, among others, Jessica Ennis, has run out of money and is to be demolished.

Next year, Glasgow hosts the Commonwealth Games. Obviously, it will be a more modest affair but it still involves 6,500 athletes and officials, 71 nations, one million tickets and a television audience of up to a billion.

Yet, it has managed to deliver an Olympic-class swimming facility for £13.5 million. The organisers have achieved this by adding a second 50-metre pool to Glasgow’s existing complex, and sending the divers to the Edinburgh diving pool built for the 1970 Commonwealth Games.

And the cost of these entire Games — including venues for 17 sports? Less than one-and-a-half times that of the single new swimming centre in London: just £371 million.

The Olympics were a wonderful party, they have revived a desolate area of London, and it was unquestionably a very good thing that they happened. Lord Coe thoroughly deserves a place in the pantheon of great Britons.

Yet the Games have not kickstarted a grassroots sporting renaissance, however much the politicians and the blazers insisted they would. No Olympiad ever has.

Nor were they ever going to come in on budget or be a masterclass in handling public money. If you want one of those, look at the Diamond Jubilee (0.001 per cent of the Olympic bill). So let’s just stop pretending that London 2012 was perfect, that it was a bargain, and that there are no lessons to be learned.

The real legacy of that glorious event was the enhancement of our self-esteem and our reputation. Let’s just keep on enjoying that as long as we can.

Blaze of glory: The stunning opening ceremony and Jessica Ennis

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They made us so proud. But I'm afraid the Olympic legacy is bitter disappointment